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BRICK: the indie mag smashing hip-hop’s stereotypes

Over the last three years, BRICK has gone from a DIY zine to a new player on the music mag scene. As part of our creativity in music series, founder Hayley Louisa Brown tells us about making a magazine for herself and the importance of celebrating female talent

Hayley Louisa Brown is a poster girl for the MTV generation. Growing up in a small village in Hampshire it was one of the only ways to get her musical fix, and she ended up spending most of her time binge watching videos like 2pac and Dr. Dre’s classic 90s track California Love. As a kid she was also massively influenced by the musical tastes of her dad, who listened to everything from Mariah Carey to The Notorious B.I.G, and her uncle who would bring records by artists like Herbie Hancock when he came over from Jamaica.

All of this added up to Brown’s enduring love affair with hip-hop, and ultimately the creation of her own magazine that pays tribute to the genre. BRICK is a culmination of the experience gained from her other career as a photographer, starting as a teenager when she would blag her way into gigs with her point-and-shoot camera so that she could take half-decent photos of her favourite artists. “I remember emailing magazines like NME when I was 15 to ask if I could get photo passes for shows,” says Brown. “I had no idea what I was doing, but I did that when I was really young because I thought that’s what I wanted to do.”

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